making it work

I lost my job on Monday, March 17th at the restaurant. This came as a shock to everyone, including myself. The details of this development are not relevant to this blog, so I will not go into it here. Needless to say though, the loss of very good income has started to impact my little family.

Isaac's basketball shoes were wearing out. Right before the big Easter Classic tournament held at Disney's Wide World of Sports. Major college scouts would be in attendance. Luckily he borrowed some shoes from one of his buddies who had an extra pair. He played extremely well. The scouts should be impressed.

I've managed to get us through this rough couple of weeks by selling a crazy amount of stuff on eBay, for significant amounts of money, and by working on a few websites. But I'm running out of stuff to sell, and the websites are almost done.

What really strikes a chord with me though is how we, my family, have pulled together to make it work. It's not easy, and we're probably only a couple days away from being in serious trouble. But I have definitely cherished the added amount of time I've gotten to spend with my amazing family. Kai is developing so quickly that a single day missed could be a lifetime. Isaac's confidence is growing with his new AAU-league basketball team, which makes life with a teenager so much more fun. Erin continues to amaze me every day, with her level of commitment, cooking skills, dedication, and pure, unadulterated love.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for my birthday picnic at Blue Jacket Park. We all had a really great time, and it was really great that I did not have to cook or clean up after everyone. We may have to make this a tradition...

I've gone on several job interviews since then, and I have some great prospects. Wish us luck. I'm still absolutely committed to providing everything my family needs, and making sure that my son is raised by his parents and family, and not by the system. In this day and age, making that work seems like the most important thing ever.

hope for us all

From the restoring-your-faith-in-humanity file:

Marion County, Florida firefighters today rescued a two-month old foal (baby horse) named Shooter that had fallen into an old septic tank. Its head was stuck beneath the 3-inch thick reinforced concrete and it's torso and legs were submersed in, well, crap. The firefighters carefully broke through the concrete and the baby horse rejoined its mother.

Just one of those stories that helps restore my faith in humanity. There is hope for us all.

Link to story and photos

the longview on sand

There are a few things we parents have to look out for when you provide a sand box for your child. Cats. Ants. Hell some kids even managed to land their 10-year old buddy in critical condition when they buried him head-down in sand up to his chest.

Well, I forgot to put the lid on the sand box one night, and a cat managed to make it into his oversized litter box. It was, shall we say, a smelly mess, and a real pain to dump out so we could start over.

Well, in the process of looking for sand on the Internet, I managed to find out that most of the inexpensive play sand on the market is not actually natural sand, but a product of quarried rocks. Quartz, actually. It's called crystalline silica. And wouldn't you know it, crystalline silica dust is a known carcinogen and repeated exposure to it can cause permanent lung damage. It's a well-known workplace hazard.

And I'd dare guess that 99 percent of us unsuspecting parents are buying this stuff by the pallet-load for our kids to play in. In my research, I've found bags of this so-called "play sand" for as little as $2.50, whereas the equivalent amount of real, natural sand costs at least 10 times that much. So us unsuspecting parents stick our children, with their rapidly developing lungs in this "play sand" and think all is well.

Not to be a complete alarmist, but seriously, how can these companies sell this crap to unsuspecting parents? The little warning label on the bag is so small and most people would never dream that even something as pure and innocent as play sand has become adulterated and toxic. The risk may be small, but it's a risk that is easily avoided and something we don't have to take. So we're not.

I haven't refilled the sand box yet, because real sand is prohibitively expensive.

It's amazing to me something as abundant and natural as real sand has been replaced by another man-made creation, in spite of the known health risks. Probably in the pursuit of higher profits and market share, at the expense of the health of our children. It's despicable.

Doesn't anyone take the longview anymore?

green meadows

Nothing feels quite like a sheep licking your hands. That's what I learned today at the zoo.

Today we took Kai to Green Meadows Petting Zoo for an exciting afternoon with Nature's Finest. Kai got to feed sheep, and goats from his bare hands and he loved it. He was cracking up with excitement.

He also got to interact with ducks, guinea hens, peacocks. pigs, ponies, geese, an ox, cows, and chickens. He loved his one-lap pony ride, with me guiding the pony, and at the end of the short ride he calmly signed "more." He was yammering on and on about it after we left — he just loved it. It was amazingly cute.

Photos are up on our Picasa web gallery. Click the photo above to see...

two and counting

Yesterday was me and Erin's 2nd wedding anniversary, and we celebrated in style. My good friend Scott is the executive chef at K Restaurant, which I can confidently say is one of the top three restaurants in Orlando. He made us a meal for the ages, an eight-course affair that lasted nearly two and a half hours. Each course was built upon the last, with some fascinating flavors and textures, and plenty of truffles... Let's just say his "mac and cheese" with duck confit, gruyere cheese, and truffle oil was out of this world, decadence on a plate. But everything from his lobster summer rolls with a spicy curry sauce, to the citrus arugula salad with fresh hearts of palm, to the porcini-dusted filet mignon was amazing.

I'll say it again, K is the best restaurant in Orlando.

Moving right along, from the Unfit Mothers Department, I'm sure you heard about the story emanating from our very own Orange County, Florida, about the mother who subjected her tantrum-throwing two and a half year old daughter to a 1200 psi high pressure washer stream at a local car wash. Yes, it's true, and WESH has it on video. It's disturbing. While 1200 psi isn't enough to slice through flesh or laser through concrete, it's certainly more than any child should be subjected to. The lady did turn herself in after seeing herself on the surveillance footage on cable, and somehow, our "top-notch" Department of Children and Families, managed to take the little girl for medical evaluation, and RETURNED HER TO HER MOTHER.

I know that a temper tantrum is hard to deal with as a parent, I have firsthand experience from as little as 12 hours ago. But I also know that high-pressure water hoses are how police forces deal with rioters, and what black rights advocates were subjected to fifty years ago in racially-heated times. It's not for toddlers, ever.

Also on CNN, a four-year old was carried out of her class, drunk. Four. Years. Old. Drunk. In. School.

What the hell is going on here?

my wife

Let me just say this now, and I might say it more than once here on this blog, but I LOVE my wife. Erin is amazing. On this, the eve of our second wedding anniversary, let me just say that I love her now more than ever, and I am continually amazed at how our relationship evolves. She is an amazing mother, and an equally amazing partner in this life that we are creating. To paraphrase a hit song, if you could only see the way that Kai, Isaac and I look at her, maybe you would understand...

saturated fat = good?

"Suppose you were forced to live on a diet of red meat and whole milk. A diet that, all told, was at least 60 percent fat -- about half of it saturated. If your first thoughts are of statins and stents, you may want to consider the curious case of the Masai, a nomadic tribe in Kenya and Tanzania.

In the 1960s, a Vanderbilt University scientist named George Mann, M.D., found that Masai men consumed this very diet (supplemented with blood from the cattle they herded). Yet these nomads, who were also very lean, had some of the lowest levels of cholesterol ever measured and were virtually free of heart disease."

Interestingly enough, the fact that increased saturated fat intake leads to heart disease is not even a fact, but a hypothesis, and an unsupported one at that. The first propaganda against saturated fats were published in 1953, comparing the fat consumption to heart disease ratio of just six countries. Mind you, there are over 200 countries on the planet Earth, so a six is an insignificant sample size. In 1957, Jacob Yerushalmy, Ph.D., founder of the biostatistics graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley, looked at the same statistics for 22 countries, and found that the supposed fat-to-heart-disease link disappeared with a larger sample size. For example, the death rate from heart disease in Finland was 24 times that of Mexico, even though fat-consumption rates in the two nations were similar.

Where does it all come together? Here's the connection: Dr. Krauss, an adjunct professor of nutritional sciences at the University of California at Berkeley -- has been studying the effect of diet and blood lipids on cardiovascular disease for 30 years, found that when people replace the carbohydrates in their diet with fat--saturated or unsaturated -- the number of small, dense LDL particles decreases. This leads to the highly counterintuitive notion that replacing your breakfast cereal with eggs and bacon could actually reduce your risk of heart disease.

So perhaps it is the carbs, or sugars, in our diets that have lead to the decline of our health as a nation. The low-fat-diet-crowd may disagree, but I find the evidence compelling. Consider that since the 70's, an era when high-fructose corn-syrup was introduced to the American diet, and the low-fat diet hypothesis was pushed upon us by the FDA, the obesity rate in America has skyrocketed, despite the advents of sugar substitutes and low-calorie processed foods.

I suggest that you consider reading the labels on your foods. If you don't immediately recognize an ingredient, you may want to think twice before putting it into your or your children's mouths.

Story Link

a spoiled child

From the it's-so-ridiculous-that-it's-gotta-be-true department: Paris Hilton recently admitted to whittling down her dog collection, as in living, breathing, barking dogs, down to just 10, from a high of 17. Apparently it's against Los Angeles law for a non-breeder to own more than three dogs per address. She is still in violation of that law.

But another interesting tidbit, is that she has a ranch in Nevada where her monkeys, rabbits and ferrets live, under the care of a zookeeper.

I'm not normally one to blog about celebrity-crap, but I saw this and had to say something. Something like, ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? This represents all that is soulless and wrong. Talk about a spoiled child...

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